President Donald Trump called Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler (R) twice this week to inquire whether GOP state lawmakers could discard the will of the voters and steal President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the swing state.
Cutler’s spokesperson, Michael Straub, confirmed the two calls in an interview with the Washington Post.
“The President said, ‘I’m hearing about all these issues in Philadelphia, and these issues with your law. What can we do to fix it?'” Straub told the Post.
Straub said that Cutler had to explain to the President that the state legislature did not have the authority to nullify the election results. Additionally, a special session to do so would have to be ordered by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) or the courts, where Trump and his legal team’s lawsuits have persistently collapsed.
The President did not “pressure” the House speaker, according to Straub, and the conversations were “amicable.”
Though Cutler evidently rejected Trump’s request, he was one of the dozens of GOP Pennsylvania lawmakers who signed a letter on Friday urging the state’s U.S. congressional delegation to block the Electoral College votes from Pennsylvania (a maneuver that would have no chance of surviving the Democrat-controlled House).
The President thanked Cutler for signing the letter on Tuesday morning, saying that the state leader and others “fully understand what went on in the 2020 Election” (Trump has repeatedly failed to prove his conspiracy theories about the election process).
Trump’s calls to Cutler this week mark a third battleground state where the President has urged, with little success, Republican state leaders to hijack the election results and hand him the state’s electors instead of Biden on the basis of Trump’s bogus election fraud claims. The President has also attempted to do so in Michigan and Georgia, and both his bids were equally fruitless.
